Ecstasy, once a club drug for the elite, is suddenly flooding frat houses and high schools. Here's why

Suddenly people all over the country are talking about "ecstasy" as if it were something other than what an eight-year-old feels at Disney World. Occasionally the trickle from the fringe to the heartland turns into a slipstream, and that seems to have happened with the heart-pulsing, mildly psychedelic drug called ecstasy. To get a sense of just how far and fast "e" has moved into American communities in the past year or so, talk to Mark Bradford, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"I came to college in the fall of '97," says Bradford, 21, "and I didn't...